United States presidential election of 2024

United States presidential election of 2024, American election, scheduled to be held on November 5, 2024, in which the Democratic incumbent, Pres. Joe Biden (2021– ), is projected to face Republican former president Donald Trump (2017–21), who lost to Biden in his bid for reelection in the United States presidential election of 2020.

Background: the unique status of the 2024 election

Soon after the U.S. congressional midterm elections in November 2022, Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, and he subsequently remained by far the most popular presidential candidate among Republican voters. In 2023 Trump’s indictment on multiple state and federal criminal charges—including those stemming from acts of business fraud in New York state in connection with a hush-money payment to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels; from Trump’s retention and concealment of classified documents after leaving the White House; and from his various efforts to overturn the presidential election of 2020—rendered the Republican presidential race, and in all likelihood the presidential election itself, historically unprecedented. In no other U.S. presidential contest had the leading candidate or nominee of either major party (Republican or Democrat) been under criminal indictment. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to federal and state indictments, included his participation in a conspiracy to create fraudulent slates of pro-Trump electors in certain swing states and his pressuring of Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes to belatedly declare Trump the victor in that state’s election. (In March 2024, a state-court judge in Georgia dismissed six of the 41 criminal charges against Trump and his codefendants, including three related to Trump’s direct communications with Georgia state officials, on the grounds that the indictment did not specify how the interventions solicited by the defendants would have violated the U.S. Constitution and the Georgia state constitution, which Georgia state officials are required to support under their oaths of office. In April, the same judge denied Trump’s motion to dismiss the case on “free speech” grounds, rejecting the argument that the statements by Trump on which the charges were based amounted to political discourse that is protected under the First Amendment.) In addition, Trump and his private conglomerate, the Trump Organization, were found liable on civil charges of business fraud in a suit filed by the New York attorney general’s office, and Trump himself was found liable on civil charges of sexual abuse and defamation in two suits filed by the writer E. Jean Carroll. In February 2024, the judge in the business fraud suit ordered Trump to pay more than $350 million in penalties and barred him from serving as an officer or director of any company in New York state, including the Trump Organization, for three years. Trump was granted a 30-day grace period for either paying the penalties and accumulated interest himself or submitting a bond that would guarantee full payment should he lose his appeal of the case. As the grace period came to a close in late March, a New York appeals court panel reduced to $175 million the amount of the bond that Trump would need to secure and extended the grace period by 10 days.

The ensuing trials in three of Trump’s criminal cases were originally scheduled to begin in March and May 2024, at the height of the primary season, making it likely at the time that Trump would need to limit or at least coordinate his campaign events to accommodate his appearances in court. In each case, however, Trump’s legal team filed numerous motions or appeals arguing for dismissal of the charges or requesting court actions or judgments whose execution would effectively delay the trial’s starting date. In January 2024 the federal criminal case concerning Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, whose trial date had been scheduled for March 4, was indefinitely delayed after Trump appealed the district court’s ruling rejecting his contention that he should be immune from prosecution for actions he committed while serving as president. In February a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed with the district court that Trump did not possess absolute, or permanent, immunity and thus could be prosecuted as a private citizen for his efforts as president to overturn the 2020 election. Trump then asked the U.S. Supreme Court to put the panel’s ruling on hold while he filed a petition for review by the full appeals court. The Supreme Court instead chose to hear the case itself, scheduling oral arguments for April 2024. The Court’s response officially extended the delay of Trump’s criminal trial until after “the sending down of the judgment of this Court,” which potentially would not take place until the end of the Court’s 2023–24 term in June or July. (See indictments of Donald Trump.).

In March 2024 the state criminal case concerning business fraud, whose trial date had been scheduled for March 25, was postponed to April 15 following a request by the Manhattan district attorney’s office to allow Trump’s legal team to review a set of records from an earlier federal investigation focusing on the role of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney, in the hush-money payment to Daniels. The judge in the case rejected Trump’s motion for dismissal, disputing his claim that prosecutors had improperly withheld federal records from Trump’s attorneys. As the starting date of the trial drew closer, Trump employed various legal tactics aimed at dismissing or significantly delaying the case, including a second request that the judge recuse himself because his daughter had worked as a political consultant for Democratic candidates (the judge had declined an earlier recusal request in 2023); a civil suit against the judge for issuing and then expanding a gag order preventing Trump from verbally attacking witnesses, jurors, and the families of the judge and the Manhattan district attorney, among others; and two requests to New York appellate judges, one to move the trial to a location outside Manhattan and the other to delay the trial while Trump pursued his civil suit against the judge who issued the gag order. Both requests were denied.

Trump’s conviction on any of the criminal charges would not prevent him from taking office or force him to leave office, should he win the 2024 presidential election. If Trump were to win the election and be inaugurated before the completion of either trial on federal charges, he would presumably direct the Department of Justice to dismiss the case against him. The question of whether Trump could be inaugurated while serving a prison sentence, and whether he could be imprisoned after being inaugurated, is less clear. It is also uncertain whether Trump, as president, would have the power to pardon himself. (Even if the answer to the last question is yes, Trump would be unable to erase his convictions on state charges, should he be found guilty of any of those crimes.)

In December 2023 the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump’s name should not appear on the state’s Republican primary ballot because Trump had disqualified himself from holding the office of president of the United States under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), which prohibits any person from “hold[ing] any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state” if that person has “previously taken an oath…to support the Constitution of the United States” and subsequently “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” Trump quickly appealed the Colorado court’s decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in the case, Trump v. Anderson, on February 8, 2024. On March 4, one day before Colorado’s primary elections on Super Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Colorado court’s decision, ruling that Section 3 could be enforced against federal candidates and officeholders only through congressional legislation.

Candidates and issues

Biden announced his bid for reelection in April 2023. His campaign emphasized his administration’s success in restoring economic growth and significantly reducing unemployment from the high levels reached during the recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as Democrats’ legislative achievements in the American Rescue Plan Act (2021), the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021), and the Inflation Reduction Act (2022). In his campaign appearances Biden accused Republicans of planning to drastically cut Social Security and Medicare, condemned restrictions on voting rights adopted in Republican-controlled states (see voter suppression), criticized efforts by Republican state governments to limit the rights of members of the LGBTQ community, and vowed to codify the right to abortion in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade (1973) in 2022 (see Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization).

In part because the country’s economy grew at such a fast pace during the first years of Biden’s presidency (in 2021 gross domestic product [GDP] grew by 5.7 percent, the highest annual rate in 37 years), inflation—including increases in gas prices—remained a persistent problem, eventually leading the Federal Reserve (the country’s central bank) to impose an extended series of interest-rate increases. Despite wage increases and greatly reduced unemployment, worries regarding inflation contributed to a general perception that Biden was mismanaging the economy, which in turn kept his public approval rating unusually low—less than 50 percent—during most of his first two years in office.

Shortly before Biden formally declared his candidacy, two challengers announced their own bids for the Democratic nomination: Marianne Williamson, a social activist and self-help author who had been a fringe candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2020, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an environmental activist and lawyer and the son of Robert F. Kennedy, the U.S. attorney general and U.S. senator from Massachusetts who was assassinated during his campaign for the Democratic nomination in 1968. Despite Biden’s low level of support among Democrats, neither alternative candidate was viewed as a serious threat to his nomination in 2024. Although Kennedy’s candidacy received national attention—and even some support from Republican donors—Kennedy himself was dismissed by many Democratic Party officials for his promotion of vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. (For example, Kennedy had falsely contended that vaccines cause autism and that the coronavirus might have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.) In October 2023 Kennedy announced his entry into the 2024 presidential election as an independent candidate. In February 2024 Williamson ended her presidential campaign after receiving very few votes in early Democratic primaries in New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina.

Trump faced far more challengers to his nomination than Biden did to his: by June 2023 nearly a dozen Republicans other than Trump had declared their candidacy. They included Nikki Haley, who had served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Trump (2017–18) and as governor of South Carolina (2011–17); Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida (2019– ); former U.S. vice president (2017–21) Mike Pence; and former New Jersey governor (2010–18) and 2016 Republican presidential primary contender Chris Christie. As more than 50 percent of Republican voters supported Trump (and approximately 40 percent identified themselves as members of Trump’s nativist MAGA movement), most of his primary challengers avoided criticizing him directly or forcefully. They instead presented themselves as reliable conservatives who did not face any of the serious legal challenges that threatened to eliminate support for Trump among independent voters. As Trump’s indictments were handed down, however, his popularity among Republicans did not decline significantly, as his challengers had expected. Indeed, some polls showed that his support had increased or solidified.

During the remainder of 2023 Trump continued to dominate his rivals in polls of Republican voters, despite his refusal to participate in presidential primary debates sponsored by the Republican National Committee and the steady progress of the legal cases against him. A significant proportion of Republican voters continued to accept Trump’s oft-repeated (but unsupported) claims that the criminal and civil charges against him were false and politically motivated, and many reacted positively to Trump’s suggestions that he would seek retribution for the prosecutions if elected president. By the end of the year most other Republican presidential candidates, including Pence and Christie, had abandoned their campaigns. After Trump easily won the Republican Iowa caucus in January 2024, DeSantis, who had long been the second most-popular Republican presidential candidate after Trump, also dropped out of the race, leaving only one other Trump challenger, Nikki Haley. Haley continued her campaign through January and February, despite suffering losses to Trump in subsequent Republican primaries and caucuses in New Hampshire, Nevada, the Virgin Islands, Michigan, and her home state of South Carolina. After Trump defeated her in 14 of the 16 Republican presidential primaries held on Super Tuesday (March 5, 2024), Haley finally suspended her campaign, though she declined to endorse Trump’s candidacy. Meanwhile, Biden had been victorious in all but one Democratic primary, held on Super Tuesday in American Samoa.

By March 12, following their victories in primary elections held in Georgia, Mississippi, and Washington state, both Biden and Trump had accumulated enough delegates to win their parties’ presidential nominations.